A search engine by and for the federal government
search.govThe new tech stuff the government has been putting out is legitimately fantastic. login.gov is probably my favorite sign-in experience, maybe slightly behind Google's (and considerably ahead of Apple or Microsoft's).
It's funny we expect governments stuff to be so bad that when they do something at the level of a regular SaaS our minds are blown.
it's the virtuous cycle of Republicans running on the meme that the government is inherently bad, then using their power to make it worse
Oh look, only took 7 comments to find someone that is making the assertion that bad UX is a partisan issue.
It's essentially true. Look at the battle over the IRS trying to make it easier to file taxes. Republicans are strongly opposed.
If the government websites are too good, a lot of useless middlemen will be out of business.
It’s partisan. Progressives obfuscate important information like mug shots and information about the race and intelligence of criminals.
It may not be true in principle, but it's true in practice.
To be clear, I like login.gov considerably more than random SaaS logins.
I remember on some radio show many years back a program where tech people were going back to government to make the tech better. They interviewed the guy that started it and it was really inspiring. I wish I could remember more details. These are true patriots.
You might be thinking of the US Digital Service (https://www.usds.gov/)
https://codeforamerica.org/ sounds similar
People like Matt Cutts left Google to do exactly this. Much happier than when he was the head of the Google Search Spam team.
There’s a ton of interesting stuff at https://www.web.dma.mil/WEB-NextGen/
Just look at the significant links section
reminds me of Snow Crash, where the US federal government is reduced to a software entity.
Do they still force you to share your biometrics with a third party private service (Id.me)?
Login.gov doesn't.. but plenty of federal sites (like IRS) are still using that id.me poppycock. Here's to hoping they prioritize a migration soon.
I was absolutely flabbergasted that they didn't even white-label the third party stuff behind their own .gov domain, which means they're mis-training users towards "It's normal to hand over extremely sensitive official information to vaguely-plausible-looking companies with websites and certificates ultimately under the control of Montenegro."
I doubt any conventional web user knows or cares that “.me” is a ccTLD, or that it’s even related to Montenegro. If anything the reaction is “you don’t need a .com!?”
And they'll accept anything from you without any ID whatsoever if you just use paper and a postage stamp.
What do you mean exactly?
The IRS doesnt require any auth if you print out whatever and mail it to them, no internet. They just believe you
Login.gov is adding the capabilities needed to meet IRS’ identity and credential proofing requirements.
Will require biometrics in some form, with fallback to in person proofing at USPS.
(no affiliation, just a fan)
SSA Already announced the switch to login.gov, it looks like it will have broad support if they are starting the migration there.
I don't suppose this implies the end of the social security number as a form of identity access authorization?
No, because the government didn’t use it as one, just private businesses.
Yeah it's cool. Lately just feels like they're doing work, not all home runs, but they're out there swinging.
I've noticed this too, night and day from the Trump years.
Here in Ohio we have the Intel plant going up just east of me, goverment spending is great when it works and thats what the Dems have become all about. But the flip side is our courts have been sold off to the highest bidder and our juvinile and family court systems are run like for porfit orphanages with the legal right to seperate children from their families [1]. Big government is great when it works but terrifying when it overreaches as is happening now.
I'm glad everyone is making money but, in more ways than one, we are simply incurring a debt that will have to be paid back by our children.
1. https://www.amazon.com/Injustice-Inc-Americas-Commodifies-Ch...
https://data.gov is also worth mentioning
Here's the repo:
That’s so cool, I didn’t know the government had an open GitHub acct!
Check out https://code.gov/agencies, there are many more
Why would a .gov Web site like this have dependencies on, and information leaks to, googletagmanager.com and crazyegg.com?
Maybe I'm dense but why would you expect a government service to not use common tooling available to them?
I think access to government services is an impoetant part of democracy. Because you have no alternative, they should be Held to higher Standards of privacy. Google doesn't need to know everything.
This is how you increase the cost of government services. Though it would be nice if over time the government developed their own alternatives.
How would removing tag manager make this website more expensive to run?
It would require a dev every time someone wants to track something new.
It would require rerunning ci/cd, testing, qa to bake it in, in case it fails and breaks something.
All of that is hours of resources which translates directly into money.
With GTM, planning still occurs, organization, but someone can try something, have a debugger to iterate on, once done, hit publish. No need for dev, testing, qa, ci/cd time, breaking, reverting, etc.
It would be much more difficult to understand what users are doing with the products and prioritize development.
Can you give an example?
I'd image it's pretty typical analytics stuff.
• Logging events for errors.
• Seeing device statistics to know which browsers/devices to support/optimize for.
• Reviewing page flows to understand how users navigate/understand the site. Is the navigation easy to understand? Are the right pages highly-visible?
• Seeing which pages have high drop off rates, indicating either a resolution or lost hope.
• Analyzing trends over time to better understand users and the topics they're focused on. Is there high traffic to covid-19 symptom pages? Or maybe student loan forgiveness resources?
I can see a lot of meaningful and actionable data being gleaned from such systems. It's much more difficult to make improvements without supporting data.
(Thanks for responding.)
How can this not come from a self-hosted, secure and privacy-respecting, analytics tool?
Even their existing normal HTTP/HTTPS Web server access logs give them all of the things you listed. Even at almost the start of the Web, they did.
Google Tag Manager is a surveillance tool for the benefit of Google. And they pitch it to companies as:
> Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications
That's the first blurb on the first Web search hit. It's targeted as a tool for marketing people who brag about the large size of their ad spend on Google AdWords, and then need to make Powerpoints to justify that.
And who are often mimicked by people who don't know any better, but think it's best practice, because they saw a grownup doing it. Or they copy&pasted it from somewhere without understanding.
And when it's on a gov't public information system, it's leaking data about citizens to a private company known to snoop on everything it can, even secretly and against reasonable expectation of privacy.
(For example, in this case, who would know that by using a prominent Web site of the federal government, their behavior on that site is leaked to Google, who, due to other snooping, can attribute it to them personally as an individual. Like, if they walked into a Federal building, to consult an official, and Google had placed hidden cameras and microphones, that it controlled, throughout the building, and even followed them to and from the federal building.)
And, technically, it introduces an additional security weakness, by loading and running code from some site not under gov't control. Which, as we just saw for the nth time yesterday, is almost never well-placed trust. And for no good reason; only mistaken-at-best reasons.
That's just an example. Most other techbro "best practice" third-party requests have similar problems, or even worse, and are similarly unnecessary.
I like where your head is at. I think you should file an issue in their repo suggesting its removal.
If there is a legitimate need for some of that functionality--which I think is plausible but not certain--then they may have an interesting response.
All of these concerns are also well levied against private enterprise, which americans are loathe to actually regulate. If you want any hope of government services undercutting private enterprise (as you should) this attitude will just hamstring the effort.
Third party services that remain involved aren't "tooling". They're part of the final site, dragging in all of that terrible behavior of the surveillance industry. So yes it's reasonable to ask why one should have to suffer that to access a public service and/or by government requirement. If we had a US GDPR and some societal expectation of privacy letting us be reasonably sure those vendors were prohibited from creating surveillance dossiers on us it would be more reasonable, but US "governance" is actually skewed the exact opposite way.
If you click through to sign up, there is a notice that it is for official use only (FOUO).
The search results aren't very good
A cool thing. In Germany this would not be possible. EVB-IT Cloud contracts, DSGVO and other legal stuff slow down everything and costs are exploding. No inhouse ressources available double the trouble
I have s feeling GDPR is often used as an excuse in these cases while there is little evidence that it's actually slowing anything down. Especially for government: they do have the data alread and the GDPR applies to the dat itself, not whether you put a fancy frontend on it or not.
Government departments tend to be slow to adopt - again, based on feeling more than hard evidence - especially emin Germany. They'll just try to find some scapegoat for why they're failing, and GDPR is perfect. I've seen the same in businesses as well, where I've seen told numerous times they're behind schedule because of GDPR or they can't do this because of GDPR and it's just not true most of the time. People just like to hide their incompetence
I don't know anything about EVB-IT, so I'll shut up about that part
I know about EVB-IT and GDPR. And it is actually slowing down a lot. While each of these things can be managed the combination is a productive killer. You will understand this if you ever worked as a it-project manager in the German goverment. There is a representative for everything and he is just doing his part and blocking everything not in his work field. It is not something like GDPR alone but the combination and the handling of these aspects. And law aspects always get the highest proirority.
Not new, 2010 maybe? But even more ingrained as part of government's 2023 Delivering A Digital-First Public Experience guidance to all agencies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2023/09/22/fact...
The gov usually contracts out its coding. Waa this made contractors under the federal gov or actual gov employees?
The team is a mix of employees and contractors. They also offer customers (government agencies who use their service) the option to use Bing results or their in-house Elasticsearch results: https://search.gov/admin-center/content/content-overview.htm...
They do good work, and it’s an important service. I believe it saves a ton of money for the federal government by reducing reinvention of the wheel. As a former federal employee and current federal contractor, it’s been very helpful to be able to use their no-cost-to-customer search services on multiple projects. On my current project we eventually shifted to doing our own search (using Postgres full text search) so we could customize the indexing and ranking, but Search.gov was a useful interim solution.
It's good too see I wish gov would make more in house solutions instead of contacting it out.
At my department that's all we do. Farm it out to 365 or beltway defense companies
Russian Gosuslugi and Ukrainian Diya coming to US!
I couldn’t find the search text field or button. ??
My first search attempt return no hits.
"Sorry, no results found for 'Israel'. Try entering fewer or more general search terms."
https://find.search.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=usas...
That's because you're searching search.gov, not all government websites. Besides this being what it "obviously" is doing, the error message also states this plainly:
>Are you looking for information from across government? Please search again on USA.gov. Click the "Search again on USA.gov" link above the search button here, or use the link below to go to the main USA.gov website. Search.gov is a service powering the search boxes on government agencies' websites. You are currently searching the Search.gov website, and this website only contains information about our service.
"search" returns nothing to: https://find.search.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=usas...
This search box only searches search.gov, so it's not surprising if there are no results for topics that are not about search engines. For "Israel" you can click the "Search again on USA.gov" tab.
France, Argentina, etc all produce the same result. It would had been a fast test to discover that.
Sure, I tried one country name and it didn't work.
But spent the time to comment on it in an external forum lol.